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Lorenzo Warby's avatar

The Dominance/Prestige distinction was already part of the literature. Will Storr seems to have come up with Propriety as the third form of status himself: though he is strangely modest about it. But once the distinction is made, it is clear enough. In his work on Middle Eastern kin groups, Philip Carl Salzmann makes the point that women in such kin groups can lose honour but cannot gain it. That is the dynamic of Propriety rather than Prestige.

Storr argues that the post-medieval breakout in science and technology in Europe was possible due to prestige from discovery providing a status path not confined by the conformities of propriety. If you want to see propriety trumping discovery-prestige, then Shirtgate, when a rocket scientist who had led a team that had landed a probe on a comet was publicly humiliated over his shirt, is such a moment.

We are dealing with the fuzzy boundaries one sees so often in social dynamics. Imposing a new norm of propriety like that through public mobbing. Clearly, it is invoking propriety but is it not also a dominance play? Propriety gets “bite” from the sanctions implied in social norms. When is that about order and group-cohesion and when dominance and to what degree?

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Dallas E Weaver's avatar

As a hard nosed scientist, the "Follow the Science" statement gives me mixed feelings. Science, using the scientific method, is about the only way of possibly knowing what is valid and not nonsense. However, when this term is used by activists and non-STEM people who can't even read the original scientific journal articles in the areas in which they opine, I feel very apprehensive. Authors of those articles use the language of STEM, failing to understand that the language of Science and STEM is, in fact, mathematics. The meaning of the term Follow the Science can only be considered a nonsensical rhetorical power grab when they don't actually comprehend the science itself.

I have watched area after area in non-STEM areas drift into non-reproducible nonsense, but never anticipated the intrusion of non-scientific notions into science itself. Yet now DEI statements are becoming required for all faculty in academia, and selections of faculty and grant awards have become based upon DEI not on merit. I fear I am witnessing Academia dying in the West. Meanwhile the papers I am reading and reviewing coming out of China are top flight research in STEM areas. Even their English language has improved dramatically in the last decade (initially it was sometimes hard to figure out what they were saying).

The Chinese government effectively eliminated a whole generation of scientists working outside of weapons research (they were still doing top flight weapons research), as I discovered when I was using Chinese papers as references on my Ph.D. Thesis. In 1984, when I visited China as a member of a group of aquaculture experts sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Science, there were new students and a few old scientists, who had been removed from science for years, literally working in the rice fields planting and harvesting. In the field of aquaculture they were merely copying the mistakes that were made elsewhere. Now, having thrown off the yoke of Mao, China now dominates aquaculture in the world, and the quality of their science is excellent.

Mao's Cultural Revolution rejected old mandarin merit-based systems which had served the country well for hundreds of years in favor of "holistic systems", where selection was based upon professed beliefs rather than on accumulations of knowledge. The "Revolution" failed dismally, at the cost of tens of millions of lives. After some 10 years, cooler, brighter, less doctrinaire heads prevailed, and China returned to meritocracy and competence and stopped ignoring the correlations between supply and demand. They seem to fully understand the implications of their cultural revolution, so they probably won't do that again for at least a few generations.

Our question is whether we will end our current "cultural revolution" before or after it destroys our ability to compete in what has increasingly become a merit-based global reality. We are witnessing our equivalent of China's cultural revolution, believing if we purify the thought of the people, we will all achieve a successful wealthy existence without essentially having to earn it. It sounds good -- noble, even -- but it's too bad it doesn't work in the real world. What works in the real world is merit-based, non-political science with a capital "S", as in S. T. E. M.

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